Facebook Refers 19% of Google's Uniques

RBC Capital Markets points out that 19% of Google's unique visitors are referred by Facebook, up from just 9% a year ago. Given current rates of growth, they also suggest that Facebook will overtake Google in terms of number of unique visitors by 2011-2012.

These two fairly amazing data points permit a couple of interesting conclusions:

A much higher proportion of referrals from Facebook go to Google rather than to Yahoo or Microsoft (who actually have a paid agreement with Facebook) which means that Facebook's growth is pushing Google's share of search higher than it would be otherwise.
If Facebook are seeking monetization, then a referral deal with Google seems like a good place to begin.
RBC concludes:

Facebook is actually positive and complementary for Google thus far, but that could change if Facebook's rapid growth trajectory continues on its current path, or if/when social media can find a business model and attract ad dollars from other online media.

At the very least, we think Facebook as the "starting point" for more and more users on the Internet could create some multiple compression for Google over time, if the momentum continues.

Using my secret-agent financial analyst decoder ring, I can tell you that "multiple compression for Google" in this context should be taken to read, "Google is paying MySpace $1 billion per year for perhaps 3% of Google's traffic. On that basis Facebook should be hitting Google up for $6 billion a year, no?"

Death, Taxes and Advertising

APRIL 15, 2009

TV, radio biggest winners

Taxes are a big business and not just for Uncle Sam.

According to Nielsen, $220 million was spent by tax services companies on advertising in 2008, up 11% from 2007.

Nearly $171 million, or 78% of the total tax prep advertising budget, was spent by H&R Block, American Tax Relief, Jackson Hewitt, JKH Holding and TaxMasters (TMIRS Enterprises).

Most of the budget was spent in Q1 and Q4 (the period preceding Tax Day) in traditional media such as TV and radio.

Nielsen estimates that $76.9 million, or 35% of total spending, went toward cable TV. A further $40.5 million was spent on spot TV and $35.7 million on network TV. Network and spot radio combined received $34.4 million, or 16% of total tax services advertising.

Only 3% of total tax services ad spending, or $6.4 million, was online, which seems strange in light of the fact that more and more filing is being done via the IRS’s e-file.

Looking ahead, whispers abound that higher taxes are coming from a new presidential administration. True or not, total ad spending by tax services firms may increase in coming years.

With that in mind, perhaps Benjamin Franklin’s adage will have to be amended: “...in this world nothing is said to be certain, except death and taxes”—and advertising.

Small Businesses Seek Solutions Online

APRIL 13, 2009

Having to do more with less, many small shops go digital.

Small businesses face stiff challenges in 2009.

According to a poll of US marketers by Bredin Business Information, the primary challenges in marketing to small businesses are funding new projects, growing the business with limited resources and increasing awareness.

In addition, marketers say the outlook for small-business marketing has changed in 2009. They are increasing their online activities, becoming more focused and conducting segmentation research to better target their customers.

It is no surprise that the local online marketing space is where many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are moving their efforts—and their dollars.

Borrell Associates estimated SMBs spent $7.4 billion on local online marketing in 2008.

That figure accounted for 11% of all SMB marketing spending, and more than one-half of total US local digital spending, including Website development.

Online Advertising Pushes Through

APRIL 8, 2009

The recession slows, but does not stop, online ad growth.

As strange as it may sound, the economic downturn may speed up the transition to digital advertising for many marketers.

The Internet’s share of total media ad spending is rising by at least 1 percentage point every year. Simply put: Marketers are spending more on Internet ads, while spending less on advertising in other media, such as newspapers, radio and magazines.

Furthermore, eMarketer projects that the online share of ad dollars will continue to grow, rising from nearly 10% this year to slightly more than 15% in 2013.

“The spending shifts predate the recession,” says David Hallerman, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, US Advertising Spending: The New Reality. “But the current economy is reinforcing the new advertising models—and making them more permanent.”

Does this make sense in light of the fact that the rate of growth for even Internet ad spending is slowing? Mr. Hallerman thinks it does.

“Digital marketing offers compelling benefits, especially for cash-conscious companies,” he says. “Marketers can more readily measure the results of Internet advertising than with most traditional media. This produces more-efficient advertising and higher ROI, which in turn pushes traditional media to compete with lower pricing.”

Which puts more pressure on traditional media’s bottom line.

“At the same time, successful Internet advertising creates a new paradigm for marketing on other media,” adds Mr. Hallerman. “Search is the prime example of the new model.”

When marketers link ads to an individual’s stated interest at the precise moment that interest is expressed—as happens with a search query—relevance breaks down the usual resistance.

“Advertising that consumers welcome is the new reality,” says Mr. Hallerman, “combining effectiveness with efficiency for marketers.”

And in the not-so-long run, that’s where the money will go.

Coupons.com Sees 192% Increase Over Last Year

Consumers Print Out $57 Million Worth in March; Cereal, Baby Products Top List

By Emily Bryson York

Published: April 07, 2009

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) -- One area where consumers aren't cutting back: coupon usage. Coupons.com reported a 192% increase in the value of coupons printed from its site in March, compared with a year ago. The total value of the coupons was $57 million.

Coupons.com had 6.6 million unique visitors this February, up 29% from 5 million the year before.

"Consumers printed a record amount of savings in March, almost tripling the amount printed last year," Coupons CEO Steven R. Boal said in a statement. "Consumers are using digital coupons to save on virtually everything they spend money on, from food to household essentials to entertainment items. We see no slowdown in sight."

Coupons have been the second-most-visited category on the internet -- behind jobs -- for about a year, said ComScore spokesman Andrew Lippsman. Coupon sites had 28 million unique visitors in February, up 41% from the year before, when they drew 20 million. Coupons.com had the biggest share of the category, with 6.6 million unique visitors, up 29% from 5 million the year before. Eversave.com came in second, with 5.5 million unique visitors in February.

In general, consumers seem to veer toward necessities at Coupons.com. Ready-to-eat cereal was the most popular category for coupon usage, followed by baby products and baking ingredients. Diet aids and yogurt rounded out the top five. Laundry supplies and personal care entered the top 10 in March, while salty and portable snacks fell off the list, after ranking in the top five in February.

Online coupon usage has grown dramatically in the past year and in direct opposition to the faltering economy. Mr. Boal said his business has been growing about 25% every month since the recession began. It's helped that major marketers have pulled spending from newspapers as local papers continue to fold. The company's clients include Johnson & Johnson, General Mills, Kimberly-Clark, Kraft Foods, Clorox, Kroger, Safeway, CVS and Kmart.

A Pricing Revolution Looms in Online Advertising

Demographic profiling and behavioral targeting by such companies as Google, Quantcast, and ValueClick is slashing ad costs and threatening Web publishers

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2009/tc2009045_367596.htm

By Ben Kunz

Look just to the right of this article. There, on your computer screen, lies a little, two-dimensional secret that will soon threaten major online publishers and their precious advertising revenue.

It's called the banner ad, and its cost may plummet.

For a decade, Web site publishers have relied on an old advertising model: Publishers provided advertisers access to readers, and the more desirable those readers, the more an online publisher could charge. WSJ.com, for example, charges advertisers as much as $64.60 to show a banner ad to 1,000 viewers. (In advertising language, this is called CPM, or cost per thousand impressions.) In the past these fees made sense because The Wall Street Journal's readers are highly affluent, a perfect target for many upscale brands. The better the audience, the more advertisers are willing to pay for ad space.

But what if marketers could find new ways to reach the same audience—with ads on sites that won't charge nearly as much? What if those other ads cost as much as 95% less?

Profiling and Targeting Site Visitors

Online publishers face a big revenue squeeze as companies become more sophisticated in their ability to determine who is visiting what Web sites and when—just as marketers look to squeeze more from dwindling ad budgets.

The old online ad model is getting turned on its ear by such firms as ComScore (SCOR) and Quantcast. These and other upstarts specialize in such methods as so-called demographic profiling, which pinpoints the types of people visiting each Web site, and behavioral targeting, which helps advertisers reach a desired audience based on a person's past Web-surfing behavior.

Marketers can use these tools to reduce online ad costs dramatically. Say your company sells "Bidgets," a luxury product. Ordinarily you'd run banner ads on FancyOldSite.com, which reaches your target audience of men and women who earn more than $150,000 a year. The ads are expensive—say $60 per thousand impressions—but they reach your ideal audience.

You might instead embed a snippet of code in the banners that run on FancyOldSite.com. This places so-called cookies on the computers of everyone who sees the ad so you can track them when they visit other Web sites. That's where retargeting kicks in. Every time a former FancyOldSite.com reader who saw your ad visits other Web sites, your Bidget banner ads pop up again. The banner ads reappear because the cookie on that computer flags a retargeting "network" of thousands of sites, saying "This desirable reader is back." These new ads are cheap—$3 CPM—but they reach exactly the same audience.

Here Comes Google, via DoubleClick

Congratulations! You just used behavioral targeting to reduce your ad costs from $60 to $3 CPM, a 95% savings. (And yes, those cost quotes are based on real client experience.) Online targeting of individuals has been around for more than a decade, notes John Ardis, vice-president for corporate strategy at ValueClick (VCLK), another firm that specializes in online advertising. But interest has surged during the recession. "Obviously today's economy has advertisers looking to do more and more efficient things," he says. Not only are costs lower; results are often better. ValueClick, which provides retargeting, says click-through rates on such ads are 110% to 840% higher than average because they reach an audience more likely to be interested in a product or service.

Google (GOOG) is using its $3.2 billion acquisition of DoubleClick to get into the behavioral targeting game, using the data it monitors from millions of Web users to place more relevant ads. The size of the prize is significant; today Google has less than a 2% share of the $8 billion U.S. market for online display advertising, compared with its 63% share of the U.S. search market.

Quantcast is breaking some of the most interesting new ground in consumer targeting. Several services such as ComScore estimate Web audience demographics by using panels, or small, representative groups of people who agree to have their behavior tracked. Quantcast, however, makes 6 billion direct observations a day from cookies on computers that track the media habits of more than 900 million people worldwide. Quantcast then uses mathematical models to track the paths of consumers through millions of Web sites to determine, for instance, if you are a man age 35 to 44 with more than $100,000 in household income. The data is not individually identifiable—neither your name nor your address are collected—but the sheer size of the data set lets advertisers know exactly what type of people visit each Web site. This approach is relatively new. Quantcast launched its directly measured data service in 2006 and has been rapidly expanding it to new publishers.

And that's the rub. If you, an advertiser, know every Web site visited by your most desirable audience, you can find many ways to reach them other than through such marquee Web sites as WSJ.com (NWS), BusinessWeek.com (MHP), or that of The New York Times (NYT)—especially if the cost is lower. "Why would I pay $60 if I can pay $4?" asks Ardis of ValueClick. "There is really going to be a backlash. Newspapers felt it. Magazines felt it. There is a reckoning coming in online channels, too."

Publishers Can Use Data to Fight Back

But online publications don't have to go the way of newspapers—if they, too, learn to use the new customer data. "It will give them new and more innovative ways to sell the audience," says Quantcast Chief Marketing Officer Adam Gerber. Consider a site whose visitors are 80% male. In the past, that site may have attracted only advertisers who wish to reach men, leaving some inventory unsold. But with better data about readers, the site can now sell to a new set of advertisers the 20% of its space that attracts women.

Christine Peterson, president of 212, New York's Interactive Advertising Club, agrees that publishers can defend themselves. For example, they could charge an advertiser a premium if they can predict that readers are in the market for that advertiser's services. "Just because I looked at a financial page doesn't mean I'm ready to hear from Charles Schwab (SCHW)," she says. "But if I've been back and forth to multiple financial pages in recent days, could they charge Charles Schwab more? Yes."

The new, behavioral-targeted data could spur demand for online advertising. "We had a marketer who was launching a low-carb bread when Atkins and the South Beach diets were all the rage," Ardis notes. "They were targeting women—but it turned out a huge portion of those who signed up were men in their 40s who were starting to develop a little paunch." The advertiser started to spend more on advertising to reach the newly discovered male audience, he says.

So hope remains for online publishers: Find unsold segments of your readers and sell them to advertisers that previously couldn't access them. Use data on past reader "click streams" from other Web sites to help advertisers reach the consumers who are most interested in their products.

Publishers, your audience data is waiting. Advertisers want it. But you'd better hurry, because the price of your old online business model is falling fast.

What CMOs Are Saying: Part III

APRIL 6, 2009

Marketing dollars get tight, but don’t disappear.

A number of reports, and many media articles, say the sky is falling on marketers—and ad dollars are evaporating.

The annual “Marketing Outlook” study, from the CMO Council, doesn’t agree.

Following What Are CMOs Thinking? and More About What CMOs Are Thinking, this, a third survey of CMOs, found that, despite the economy, marketers see budgets holding up fairly well and tightly controlled dollars going to growing and retaining market share.

But isn’t that where marketing dollars always go?

Yes, but as the report states: “Marketing, we are happy to report, is not running scared from the economy by slashing budgets and headcount. Instead, marketing is getting back to our key function: driving business and opportunity to sales and owning the customer experience.”

The pressure is on, however, for marketers to contribute to the bottom line. Management is demanding that marketers grow market share and improve operational efficiencies. Read: more accountability.

That is probably why Website development and digital marketing topped the list of agency changes for 2009.

“Digital marketing has moved well beyond search as social media and experiential marketing continue to grow and evolve,” said Dave Couture of Deloitte Consulting LLP, one of the sponsors of the report. “Savvy marketers are applying collaboration marketing methods as a central component of their efforts to maximize customer lifetime value in the digital economy.”

One-half of the global marketers surveyed claimed they were either holding firm on budgets or anticipating increases. Nearly one-third planned small budget increases, and 8% expected increases of more than 10%.

On the other hand, nearly one-half said they would decrease spending, with 19% expecting cuts of more than 15%.

In fact, when asked pointedly how economic conditions were influencing their budgets, 34% of the marketers said they were sharpening focus and reducing spending.

As noted above, however, not everyone shares the relatively rosy outlook of the marketers surveyed by the CMO Council.

In an article in Brandweek, Marc Babej of the marketing consultancy Reason inc. said, “Marketing budgets in many, if not most categories, are subject to cuts and in many cases they are deep cuts. That’s just the reality. Marketing positions are being cut too, absolutely.”

He believes that many marketers are simply “putting on a brave face.”